Migrating cloud environments

Bustle is an Australian-based company that provides transport management systems designed at aggregating road freight and carrier management. The Bustle platform enables carriers and transport companies to see the whole picture of their entire supply chain through a connected platform and driver applications. Removing paper and transferring processes to automated digital capture creates an Internet of Things (IoT) environment for organisations delivering real-time data to stakeholders.

Servicing Tier 1 customers down to SME “mum and dad” type carriers, Bustle advances the reduction and removal of paper data capture in 5 key areas of their business: Operations, Safety & Compliance, Invoicing, Asset Management and Fatigue. Regardless of the size of transport organisations, it is still common practice to see businesses using a mixture of hardware, software and paper to capture business data. Consolidating these requirements into minimal systems is a key value proposition Bustle offers its customers as they look to manage their wider carrier network. 

Over the past few years, the Bustle platform has evolved into a whitelabel software with a wide range of features specifically focused on road freight and becoming the gold standard for responsible growth and management of transport operations. The software delivers; 
 

One of Bustle’s primary operational features is the connection of real-time work events using Google Maps Platform and Google Cloud Platform to improve real-time decision making. With this in mind, Bustle required an external advisor that had an understanding of Google Maps and the location information within the platform, while also bringing experienced Cloud engineers to the table. As Bustle’s Google Maps partner since 2017, Liveli was equipped to understand their platform requirements and was chosen based on their knowledge on how to scale their platform to meet future business demands.
 

In June 2019, Bustle engaged Liveli as a trusted advisor in a two-part technology audit to ensure their platform was hosted using an appropriate cloud platform and further, that their implementation was set up for success.

To enable a strong application foundation for the future, Liveli first carried out an audit of their existing web application hosted on Microsoft Azure. Bustle shared their challenges and requirements for a scalable, highly-secure and performant cloud environment, which included: 

Architecture
Bustle’s application components were hosted in disparate network locations, with their database and application servers communicated without each other over the public internet. At scale this showed potential security vulnerabilities and also introduced latency, affecting the overall performance of the application.

To overcome this, Liveli provided Bustle with a design for one fully-managed containerised environment with components having close network proximity to each other, within the same network.

Autoscaling
Bustle indicated to Liveli that their application was a database constrained one, in that their database was the bottleneck for overall system performance.  Bustle required a database that scaled to meet periods of delivery demand.  In addition to this, the application layer received varying demand across the day, with increased load in the morning when delivery slots were allocated, and lower load in the evening when deliveries quietened down.To handle this fluctuation of demand in an efficient manner, Liveli designed an elastic and autoscaled architecture. 

To achieve this, Kubernetes was identified as the service to provide a scalable application stack. Compute nodes and containers within the Kubernetes architecture can gracefully scale the Bustle application accordingly, without negatively impacting the user experience.

Pricing
Bustle were after an affordable pricing model that accurately reflected their cloud service consumption, providing resource-based scaling and dollar per minute pricing.